Fellowship Greenville Gains Record Accuracy By Switching To Asset Panda

This South Carolina house of worship needed a way to track its assets, but the solutions it looked at were too expensive and too unwilling to work with a smaller organization. Then came Asset Panda, a software solution that can be scaled to groups both big and small.

Asset Panda Solutions:

• Check in/Check out status
• Work orders/ Maintenance
• Customized reporting
• Unlimited custom fields
• Unlimited actions
• Barcode scanner
• Mobile app
• Cost-effective
• Data Import

Customer since: June 2018

Fellowship Greenville is a church that serves a local congregation of about 3,000 people every Sunday. Our 60 employees manage facilities, website upkeep, audio/visual equipment for events and performances, and serving our members through meetings and groups.

It was easy to keep track of our inventory back when we bought all of our machines through Dell and on warranty. I would check when the warranty expired, and mark that machine for replacement. But now our employees use Macs, PCs, Chromebooks, and more, and we don’t always buy the warranty for each asset, so it got harder to keep track of their lifecycles.

For a long time, I was using a free asset inventory solution called Spiceworks. I picked it because it was free so I didn’t have to have anybody sign off on it. But as our inventory got more complex, I increasingly ran into frustrations with it. After a couple of years of complaining, my boss said, “What would it take for us to get a better product that would help us track assets?” Because ultimately, a free asset inventory solution wasn't helpful when we were using up our time fighting with it to make it work.

I don’t know how I came across Asset Panda. I think it was a simple web search. It was after I already had several bad experiences with other vendors. They couldn’t connect with us. They were used to dealing with huge corporations and really couldn’t understand the needs of a small little shop like us. They couldn’t relate to us, and the price tags were too high for us.

Everything changed after our first meeting with Asset Panda. First off, the software looked fantastic. As an IT guy, I appreciated how well-developed and modern the Asset Panda interface looks. I have a good user experience every time I use it. Additionally, the team is amazing. I’ve gotten so much assistance from the Asset Panda staff and it has been tremendous. There was also a price point for smaller organizations, and the price was what we were looking at spending. That was back in July, about three months ago. The sales process went smoothly, and the onboarding process was great as well. I’m still in touch regularly with the Asset Panda team.

I was using a simple database before, so Asset Panda’s custom actions changed my workflow a lot, and for the better. I didn’t understand until the onboarding process, that literally, the actions will do everything for you. For example, Asset Panda helped us create a “lifecycle” action to track each device’s maintenance and replacement schedule, and all you have to do is click for it to fill in the database with all that information, taken from a barcode scan. The beauty of that is I can hand off tasks to people who haven’t been trained on it, and they can still do that.

Overall, I think the real strength is that the tool is fun to use, so everybody’s using it. Nobody’s putting it off, and they’re tracking assets now. Some of our staff used to be prone to saying, “I’ll move this device now and record that later,” and then never record it. With the mobile app, they can do both at the same time. “I’m moving this computer, so let me scan it.”  The barcode scanner is a piece of cake, and the mobile app is easy to use, so we’re keeping better track of stuff. We used to have a hard time sticking with asset management because we didn’t have the right tools.

Now I’ve got confidence that our inventory is accurate. It feels so good to be this organized, and I love that Asset Panda is as excited about managing my assets as I am. Asset Panda has a great product, and just as importantly, it has a great team.

–Paul Tedder, IT Systems Administrator